Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Introducing the Archive Corps Meet the man behind a new effort to save documents and other artifacts before they disappear.

Jason
Scott has something of a reputation. He’s a historian who works for the
Internet Archive, and he’s known in some circles as the guy who can save
bits of history right before they disappear.

So when he found out that a small store in
Maryland that sold manuals for machinery was going out of business, and
was going to get rid of its collection of nearly 200,000 obscure
booklets in just a few days, Scott got to work.

He got to Maryland on a Friday to check out the
stockpile at Manuals Plus. By Wednesday of the next week he had rallied
over 70 volunteers to put together 1,600 boxes of manuals (nobody
counted exactly how many booklets fill those boxes, but the guess is
between 50,000 and 75,000) that now sit in three storage containers. The
whole endeavor cost about $9,000, most of which was donated to the
project.